


Clearer with Distance

by slipstream



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Bay Movies), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Blindness, Disabled Character, Family Dynamics, Fluff, Gen, Glasses, Turtle Tots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 17:43:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15006035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream
Summary: Donatello is almost eight before they finally find a pair of glasses with his correct prescription.  Before that, the severely farsighted turtle just has to make do.  His brothers do what they can to help out, even if it means reading all his boring stereo instructions to him for the millionth time.





	Clearer with Distance

The box is slick underneath Donnie’s fingers, glossy cardboard unwarped by water, the corners crisp and unworn.  _New_ , or at least freshly thrown out, which for a mutated turtle scavenging the sewers of New York is basically the same thing. 

His chest swells with excitement, expert fingers feeling at the seams until he finds the  opening flap.  The box is bulky but light—a promising combination—and rattles faintly when shaken.  Definitely some twist ties loose in there.  He gropes greedily inside, worming his skinny arm in between the broken pieces of protective Styrofoam until his fist closes on his prize: a thin paper booklet with staples along the binding.

“Oh no,” groans Mikey, somewhere off to his left.  “He found _another_ one.”

“Not it,” says Raph automatically; a mistake, because he’s close enough that Donnie can pinpoint him by sound even if he has trouble picking his blurred form out from the rest of the garbage heap. 

“Raph!”  He thrusts the little pamphlet towards what he guesses is his brother’s nose.  “What’s this say?”

Shadows of hands shove him back, not hard enough to knock him over, though.  “I dunno, genius.  It’s _dark_.”

“Not _that_ dark.”  A greasy yellow glow fills the far end of the tunnel, casting crisp shadows against the brick.  The light’s softer here, the edges of things increasingly smeared the closer he gets to them, but it’s bright enough that Donnie barely has to use his flashlight.  It’s easier for him to spot the gleam of a potentially interesting object than sort through every washed up boot and rusted can by hand.  Safer, too, as the still-thumping cut bisecting his left palm can attest.  At least it’s finally crusted over and stopped oozing.  “C’mon, read it for me.”

“I ain’t gonna!”

“ _Read it_ read it read it read it—”

“ _Hush_.” 

Dad doesn’t shout.  Dad hardly ever has to shout, and never twice.  Not so close to topside, anyway.  Donnie’s mouth clamps shut obediently.

“This is not the place.  Raphael will read to you when we get home, Donatello.”

Raph whines (“ _Daaaad,_ I read the _last_ one!”), but his father holds firm, setting him back to the day’s scavenging with a single clipped command.  Reassured that _he’s_ not the one to have been assigned to the task, the soft, mostly-blue shape of Leo finally pops into view, a smear of white slashing crookedly across where his mouth should be.

“Over here,” he says, taking Donnie by the hand (something Donnie _hates_ , but on unfamiliar territory has no grounds to object to).  “Found a bunch of onions.  Help me  pick out the rotten ones.”

 

*

 

Everybody has their place within the family.  If you  need somebody to boost you into a high pipe or check in the shadows for monsters (Raph says that the towering white figures from his dreams with needles for fingers aren’t real, but Donnie’s not so sure), you get Dad.  If you need somebody to tell you all the rules for Yu-Gi-Oh or tattle on you when you wander too far into the dark, you get Leo.  Mikey’s great at farting at the dinner table and whining until you feel sorry for him when he loses a game that _he_ made up the rules to, while it’s Raph’s job to not share when you want a turn at shooting baskets and snuggle up tight against you under the blankets when winter blows ice cold through the Lair.

Donnie’s got strong, nimble fingers and can recite long passages of Harry Potter from memory, even does a pretty good job of mimicking the voices that Dad uses, but when Leo finds a coverless copy of _The Order of the Phoenix—_ their one missing title in the series—nobody asks him take over when Dad gets too tired to do another chapter.

It’s not that Donatello doesn’t know _how_ to read.  Dad taught him his alphabet same as his brothers, one warm hand at his elbow as he guided Donnie’s finger through the thick, ever-gathering dust of the fan room floor, tracing out the shape of each letter over and over until Donnie had every stroke memorized. 

If he writes large enough, going back over each word twice with the long side of their few precious pieces of grubby sidewalk chalk until the pastel lines stand out bold against the dark concrete floors, Donnie can make out whole words.  Kanji is harder, crucial, tiny strokes lost amidst the overall shape of the character, but Dad has a long scroll of poetry in oversized calligraphy hanging above his sleeping mat that Donnie has had memorized since he was three:

 _A lovely thing to see:_  
_through the paper window's hole,_  
_the Galaxy._

For reasons he can’t yet explain, he has no trouble at all reading the oversized text of the bulletin boards he occasionally glimpses through narrow storm drains, hungry eyes devouring every line of copy even if he lacks the context needed to appreciate the appeal of things like “semi-annual sales” and “now in theaters”. 

He has never seen a star, much less a galaxy, but after some careful questioning, he doesn’t think Leo or Raph or Mikey have seen one, either. 

The bigger something is, the further it is away, the easier it is for Donnie to understand. 

The problem is that the things that interest him, that confound him and make him burn for _more_ , are close and very, very small. 

He gets so _frustrated_.  So _angry_.  It’s there, it’s right _there_ , but he can’t—

“ _Please_.”  He shoves the stack of books into his brother’s hands.  “Please please _pleeeeease_...!”

“Fine,” Leo sighs, even though they both know that technically, it’s Raph’s turn again.  “ _Fine_.”

There’s an old beanbag chair that Dad sewed up that’s almost big enough for two.  Leo tucks his feet under him primly while Donnie wedges himself firmly against his side, long legs braced against a crack in the concrete to keep them from toppling over. 

“I’m not reading you _Advanced Wiring_ again, I _know_ you’ve got that one memorized.”  He tosses the battered book to the side with a thump.  “So which’ll it be?   _Heating and Plumbing_ or _Decks, Porches, and Patios_?”

“ _Decks_.”  The meager collection of Time Life Home Repair and Improvement books is one of his most prized possessions.  _Heating and Plumbing_ is his second favorite, but Leo’s _terrible_ at describing all of the diagrams.  “The part about load-bearing footings.” 

The book smells comfortingly of mildew when Leo cracks it open.  He’s smaller than Donnie by almost half a foot, his head wobbling precariously on a neck barely bigger than Raph’s wrist, but he has a nice voice, smooth and even with an extra puff of breath behind the _t_ sounds that Donnie finds himself echoing for hours afterwards. 

“Where do you want me to start?  Concrete forms or how to determine the frost line?”

“Doesn’t matter.”  He hasn’t told Leo that he’s actually memorized that one, too.  _All_ of them, to be honest.  It’s just that sometimes he needs something, _anything_ , to help his brain go quiet.  “Frost lines.”

Leo flips to the appropriate page, squirms until his shell is nestled more comfortably in the folds of the beanbag, and starts to read.  Donnie digs his sharp chin into the hollow of his brother’s shoulder, closes his eyes, and listens.

 

*

 

Mikey is the best at it, despite being the least interested in schoolwork of any of them.  Maybe it’s _because_ of his blasé acceptance of his own academic shortcomings.  Where Leo huffs and repeats things over and over, trying to get it _perfect_ , and Raph storms off with a growl at the first barrier he can’t punch his way through, Mikey plunges right along unrattled no how many bumps he hits, accepting any corrections to his pronunciation with a casual shrug. 

Even when one of Donnie's manuals turns out to be written in French. 

“En-lev-ez le...’  The heck is this word, bro?  One of the letters is wearing a _hat_. ‘Buh... Booty-er?’”

“Spell it if you can’t sound it out.”

“B-O-I with a pointed hat-T-I-E-R.”

Donnie frowns, fingers retracing his steps across the condensation pump, trying to figure out which piece is most likely supposed to come off next.  “I think that’s the cover for the fan.”  He gives the fan enclosure an experimental pull, then a twist, then a harder, more determined pull, but it doesn’t budge.  He runs his fingers around its rim, looking for the telltale round bump of screwheads, but finds nothing.   “Uh, is there a tab I’m supposed to press to make it pop off or...?”

“Maybe?”  A rustle of paper as Mikey folds the directions back to look at the diagram.  “Are you sure these are the right instructions for this pump?  It doesn’t quite look like the drawing.  That fan cover piece is a completely different shape.”

Donnie’s stomach does an anxious somersault.  And he’d been so _excited_ to find something thrown away in its original box.  “I mean, a pump’s a pump, right?  How different can they be?”

Half an hour later, Donnie’s managed to remove the fan cover, but not without a sickening crack of plastic and a muffled swear from his brother that tells him he broke something.  Hopefully it wasn’t anything crucial.  He’ll have to run some tests after he’s finished cleaning it and putting it back together, but since the pump wasn’t working in the first place it will be hard to— 

The main hatch creeks open, then closed again.  “ _Tadaima!_ ” call two voices.  Leo’s voice cracks on the last syllable, and Dad sounds tired, but pleased.

“ _Okaeri!_ ” Donnie and Mikey call together, Raph chiming in faintly from the other side of the Lair.  Donnie sniffs the air.  Beneath the gust of sewer smell is the unmistakable odor of wet fur and back alley dumpster he’s come to associate with food. 

He puts down the tools to help Dad and Leo bring in the last of the groceries—bags and bags of iceberg lettuce with browned outer leaves (his mouth waters, knowing the cool, wet crunch awaiting inside), and a box of short pull tab cans that could be either tuna or cat food.  Mikey makes a pleased little chirrup as he passes him the cans, which means it’s probably the latter.  Fancy Feast is his favorite.    

The chore is quickly finished with five sets of hands.  Leo keeps bumping into him, thin limbs still quivering with the excitement of getting to go topside.  Donnie tucks his own arms close and starts edging out of the kitchen and back towards his corner of dissembled stereos, suddenly not a excited about the prospect of lettuce heart supper.  He’s never been above ground.  It’s too dangerous with his limited eyesight. 

“Ah, Donatello.  A moment more, my son.  I have a gift for you.”

A large, grey-brown shape crouches before him and presses a closed cardboard box into his hands.  Too large for a clock radio, too small to be a VHS player, but mostly empty either way. 

“You got Donnie an iron?!” asks Mikey incredulously, crowding close on his left. 

Raph huffs dismissively, but presses in close to his right.  “It’s just the box, dummy.” 

“Go on,” Leo says, fidgeting anxiously from one foot to another.  He’s too close for Donnie to make out his expression, but his tone suggests that there’s a surprise that he’s in on, or maybe some sort of joke.  “Open it.”

Something heavier than an owner’s manual is rattling around inside. Batteries, maybe, or an overlooked set of cables.  Dad couldn’t have been lucky enough to find him a discarded remote.

His family looms over him expectantly as he opens the box and reaches inside.  The shape of the object is bizarre:  two thick, curved circles, each attached to a long, hinged piece of plastic.

Glasses.  His heart sinks.  He’s lost track of how many pairs he’s tried, over the years.  His thumbs swipe idly across the lenses, noting with dull surprise how thick they are, the pronounced outward curve at their center. 

“Try ‘em on!” Leo grabs at his wrists, pushing the glasses up towards his face.  “Try ‘em, try ‘em!”

There’s a break in the bridge of the nose, he realizes as he unfolds them.  Somebody’s tried to fix them with tape but not done a very good job of it.  The glasses bend alarmingly as he slips them over his beak, one lens slipping down his cheek as he struggles to hold the other in place.  He looks up. 

The world looks very, very strange.  On his left, Mikey’s familiar smudged shadows.  On his right, a stranger in a red bandana peers at him through narrowed eyes, each pale green scale of his face glimmering  faintly gold under the bare kitchen lightbulb.  In front of him, two more strangers, one skinny and green, fading back and forth into Leo's blurred shape as he bounces excitedly, the other tall and dark and covered in a thousand, _million_ lines, each strand of drying fur casting its own shadow, blue robe speckled with tiny white and yellow stars, the pointed, black-eyed face haloed in a bristle of long, white whiskers.   

He gapes, speechless.

For the first time in his life, Donatello sees his father smile.


End file.
